Unofficial news and tips about Google

January 8, 2007

Google Personalized Homepage, Blue Edition

This BeautyBlue style adds rounded corners and a blue background to Google Personalized Homepage. It also changes the font to Georgia and increases the text size.

Unfortunately, the author restricted the scope to google.de, so I fixed this to work for any Google domain and removed some minor bugs. The updated script is available here and requires Greasemonkey for Firefox or Opera.

You know, Google should really implement a color selector for the personalized homepage. I've been using my own custom CSS with the Web Developer toolbar extension for Firefox. I don't see any reason google couldn't do somewhat the same thing. It would open up some possibilities for making a "Css for google generator". Just a simple "add custom style" button in the add stuff interface.

I've always found funny that this thing is called "personalized homepage", when there aren't options to customize colors, fonts, number of columns. Some of these could be changed using gadgets or Greasemonkey scripts, but it would be nice to have some "options" from Google.

Actually, I can't think of a single Google service that lets you customize these things.

"but it would be nice to have some "options" from Google."I agree, it IS meant to be our own little page.

This gagdet lets you add custom CSS to a page http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=http://loic.herve.mail.googlepages.com/lh_modCustomGoogle.xml&synd=Not actually tried it yet due to not having much time (or actually getting around to doing it in my free-time!)The style used by the creator of the gadget is not to my taste, if it is actually working right.

So you need to wait four days to get an answer to a such a simple question.

This is a Greasemonkey script. You remove it like you remove any other Greasemonkey script: right-click on the small monkey icon at the bottom of the window, select "Manage user scripts", and uninstall the script. You can also uninstall Greasemonkey if you don't need it.